The Secret Lair

This past March I attended my first convention: PAX East. And while the concerts, the video games, and the panels were all good fun, I was surprised to find that my favorite thing about PAX East was discovering new board games. I didn’t have a chance to play Mansions of Madness or Betrayal at The House on the Hill while I was there, but I did stumble upon a real gem: a board game called Castle Panic.

We’d been browsing PAX’s “board game library”, looking for something fun to play. Everyone else had passed up this game due to its cover art and unimpressive name. But on the back of the box, one phrase had captured my attention. Cooperative tower defense.

And that’s exactly what Castle Panic is. A co-op tower defense board game. The board is arranged in rings, and your six castle towers are at the center. Monsters enter the outermost ring and progress inwards. The rings are divided into six sections, and a d6 determines where along the outer circumference each monster enters. As players take their turns, they play cards that can rebuild walls, attack monsters in specific positions, or have various other effects. At the end of each player’s turn, monsters move inward one ring and more monsters appear.

The co-op aspect really comes into play as you trade cards and plan ahead for where the monsters will be during subsequent players’ turns. Halfway through our first playthrough, we thought we had the game figured out. Then the game threw us a curve ball. The monsters rotated positions and ruined our plans, and a boss showed up and healed the other monsters. Soon a troll was behind our walls where we couldn’t get at him, and before long our last castle had fallen. We had more fun losing this game than I generally have playing any board game.

This game is no Arkham Horror. It plays quickly, and after the first playthrough you’re unlikely to ever consult the rulebook. Monsters’ hit points are tracked by rotating the roughly triangular monster chits to show whether the monster has one, two, or three hit points. Stand-up cardboard markers represent castles, walls, rolling boulders, tar, and additional fortifications. Where special rules are required, they’re generally printed on the card, the monster chit, or at the corner of the game board.

Since PAX East, we’ve instantiated a number of house rules to increase the game’s difficulty. Luckily, Castle Panic makes it easy to add house rules. You can begin the game with no walls, adjust the number of allowable card trades per turn, or play competitively to see who can slay the most monsters. Less co-operation means higher difficulty.

I still don’t own Castle Panic, but in writing this review, I’ve realized that my four-year-old could likely play this game. I think I’m going to have to get my own copy now.

Photos courtesy of Michael Delaney

Castle Panic
Players: 1-6
Recommended Age: 10 and up
Time to Play: About an hour
Price: $25

Confession time: I play a lot of so-called “casual” games. I’m talking about the video games that make hardcore gamers cringe: gem matching, time-management, hidden object games. Games like Diner Dash, Big Kahuna Reef and Mystery Case Files: Dire Grove. For over a year, I had a membership to Big Fish Games and plunked down $6.99 every month to buy titles like Airport Mania: First Flight, Heroes of Kalevala, Mall-a-Palooza and Life Quest.¹

It’s not quite as bad as playing FarmVille on Facebook,² but it’s close.

The truth is, I enjoy casual games. A lot. And I’ve played a nigh-embarrassing number of them in the past eighteen months, both on my Windows desktop and on my MacBook. The full list contains over two dozen titles, but here are just a few:

Windows

That's one cute plane.

• Airport Mania: First Flight. This is the one that started it all; the gateway game I started with when I first joined Big Fish Games. You manage inbound and outbound flights at a series of airports, shuffling planes from runway to gate, to baggage handling, refueling, repair, and even repainting. And the planes are all ridiculously cute,³ smiling and cheering when they arrive at the gate early; frowning when there’s a delay.
• Airport Mania 2: Wild Trips. More cute planes! I’m pretty sure there are new aspects to the gameplay in the sequel, but I’m hard-pressed to recall what they are, on account of those planes are just so darn cute.
• Build-a-Lot. This real-estate mogul game has thus far spawned four sequels, including Build-a-Lot: The Elizabethan Era. Build, buy, upgrade and sell houses, improve neighborhoods with essential businesses, and create a real estate empire.
• Mr. Jones’ Graveyard Shift. Quite possibly the only sexton simulator in existence.⁴ Mr. Jones is trying to earn enough to retire with his septuagenerian sweetheart and it just happens that he works in a cemetery. As with most time-management games, you begin with only the basics and work your way up to high-end accoutrements; it’s class warfare in the afterlife!
• Mystery Case Files: Huntsville. Time-management and gem-matching games are one thing, but hidden object games take geek shame to a whole new level; nothing to build, nothing to move, nothing to shoot, nothing to do. You’re playing Where’s Waldo? on your computer; even solitaire is more active! Despite this, I’ve played Mystery Files: Huntsville—which has the player searching for clues in various crime scenes and adds some puzzle-solving elements to the hidden-object genre (as most recent titles do)—through to completion…twice.

Mac

No tricked-out nametag?

• Diner Dash. If there is a patient zero in the time-management game genre, this is probably it. The basic concept is fairly straightforward—seat customers, serve them food, take their money, and bus their tables—but Diner Dash and its simple mechanic have spawned not only a number of sequels but dozens of knockoffs involving coffee shops (Coffee Rush), hotels (Hotel Dash: Suite Success), hospitals (Hospital Hustle) and beauty parlors (Belle’s Beauty Boutique).⁵
• HappyVille: Quest for Utopia. This game, which is essentially Sim City-lite, pushes the boundaries of my definition of a casual game. Most importantly, it is not divided into a series of bite-sized chunks, (e.g., gem-matching boards, time-management levels) each of which takes 5-20 minutes to play. Instead, HappyVille is a single city that the player must build from start to (ideally) utopian finish over the course of the game. Build farms, homes, hospitals, schools, stores, and other buildings, always with an eye toward what will keep your citizens happy: nearby shopping, schools and safety facilities, but nothing downwind from the farm, please.
• Heroes of Kalevala. The story behind this gem-matching game is based on the epic poem of Finnish folklore. Unfortunately, it is presented without any trace of a Finnish accent, so words like “kantele” and names like “Wainamoinen” lose their character. As with most recent gem-matching games, the goal in Heroes of Kalevala is to clear a board by changing all of the tiles beneath the gems to a single color. In most cases, tiles can be cleared by simply completing a match over them, but some tiles are locked and require specific (and often multiple) matches to clear. Some levels feature ice that must be cleared or spreading pools of tar that must be eliminated before they spread across the entire board. Each hero has an ability that can be used to clear otherwise-inaccessible tiles, stop the flow of tar, or otherwise assist in the clearing of the board.
• Mall-a-Palooza. I caught some guff from Madame Overlord Johnson for playing this game, and deservedly so. There’s a certain amount of hypocrisy in mocking her for playing My Cafe World on Facebook while I’m trying to balance the distribution of Old Navy-like clothing stores and not-really-Radio Shacks in my virtual shopping mall.
• My Kingdom for the Princess. A time-management game with a medieval fantasy twist. The kingdom is in ruins and you must direct your minions to repair roads and bridges, gather gold, build farms and ferry the princess to safety before time runs out. As with most time-management games, the trick for me is not simply completing each level, but managing to do so before the first timer expires in order to achieve a “gold” ranking. This leads to me playing some levels multiple times, trying to find the most efficient way to use my minions’ time to accomplish all the required tasks.

These are the types of games that my hardcore gaming buddies simply don’t talk about, much less admit to playing and enjoying. None of the Olde Fartz—a group that convenes online every Thursday to play first-person shooters, racers, and real-time strategy—has ever copped to playing Diner Dash, must less a game with “Princess” in the title. Am I alone in my enjoyment of both “casual” and “hardcore” (or, as Amazon calls them, “core”) games? What are you playing when no one is watching?⁶

1. I’d still have that membership if I hadn’t reached the point where I simply have so many games that I don’t have time to play them all. [↩]
2. Zyngaaaaaaaa! [↩]
3. Yes, cute! Don’t you judge me! [↩]
4. It’s a niche market. [↩]
5. Not to mention inspiring games like My Cafe World on Facebook. [↩]
6. Be very, very careful how you answer this question. [↩]

Thus far in our tour through some of the deck-building card games, we’ve taken a look the two most popular of these – Dominion and Thunderstone. Dominion succeeds by virtue of being the first of its kind and having elegant, simple mechanics, while Thunderstone takes a dungeon crawl theme and runs with it, adding new things on top of Dominion‘s basics to make a more intriguing game.

That noted, there are a shuffle¹ of deck-building card games that have emerged in me-too fashion since 2008, which some have coined the Sons of Dominion. While visiting our Friendly Local Game Store² recently, a couple of game night patrons highly recommended one of these Dominion progeny for us to check out – Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer.

Vital Statistics: Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer is a non-collectible deck-building strategy card game designed by Magic: The Gathering Pro Tour champion Justin Gary with illustrations by Eric Sabee, published by Gary Games in 2010 with a retail price of $39.99. It handles 2-4 players, and claims to have a playing time of 30 minutes, which is fairly accurate once one is familiar with the game. It is rated as suitable for ages 13 and up, which seems rather conservative – the mechanics and theme could work with younger ages, perhaps even down to 8 years-old.

Theme and production: The plot goes something like this – you are in a fantastic world, barriers between dimensions are breaking, there’s something about a fallen god coming to wreck reality, and the players take the roles of warriors defending their realm. You do this by assembling an army of Heroes and Constructs to fight the fallen god’s minions³, which gain you Honor points for defeating them. Predictably, the person with the most Honor wins the game. While the setting is suitably epic and interesting, Ascension takes a bad page from Dominion‘s book in that it doesn’t fully embrace it’s theme, in that the story of the game implies that winning should have something to do with taking out the fallen god directly… which, in the end, it doesn’t.

The game comes with a durably constructed board that serves to map out where the card stacks go, as well as provide a crib sheet for the rules. While pretty to look at, the board is completely unnecessary, as there are relatively few stacks of cards compared to a game like Dominion, and the rules are very straightforward. That said, as a play aid it allows less experienced and younger players to easily jump into the game, making it highly accessible. Also in the OOOH SHINY category, it includes plastic gem-like tokens to represent Honor points that provide a visual and tactile anchor to the world. The tray in the gamebox is slotted for easy separation and storage of the different card decks involved.

The cards are printed on thick, glossy stock that enhance their look but, oddly, makes them a bit awkward to shuffle. They also are susceptible to some chipping along the edges with frequent shuffling, due to their stiffness. Sabee’s illustrations are very stylized and distinctly done in colored pencil, capturing both a sense of whimsy and the fantastical. The card layout is outstanding: while the art is showcased over much of the face of each card, plenty of room remains for flavor text and specific game mechanics. The three numerical resources in the game – Runes, Power, and Honor – are each clearly associated with a symbol and area on the card face, making them very easy to keep track of⁴.

Gameplay: Ascension deals with three resources: Runes, which allow you to purchase new cards; Power, which allows you defeat monsters; and Honor, which functions as victory points. Each player starts with a deck of 10 basic cards⁵ and draws 5 cards into her hand. The central play area contains a supply of resources that are always available – an infinite number of easily-defeated Cultists that give Honor, and a hefty supply of inexpensive Heavy Infantry and Mystics, which give Power and Runes respectively.

The remainder of the cards in the game are shuffled into a single Center Deck, and the top 6 of these are laid out and available for purchase (or fighting, in the case of monsters) at any time. These cards consist of Heroes, which are played and cycled through your personal deck to give Power and Runes when they are used; Constructs, which function similarly to Heroes except that when played they are not shuffled back into your deck, but instead stay active in your play area and give you continuous bonuses; and Monsters, which are obviously for stabbing in the face. Additionally, Heroes and Constructs all belong to one of four thematic Factions in the game world, each of which has their own particular abilities and strategy. For example, the cards of the Mechana Faction are all expensive to buy, have special abilities that usually work only with other Mechana cards, but are worth lots of Honor. One downside is that the Central Deck contains 100 cards total that are used in every game, which results in less card variety during repeat sessions compared to other games in this genre.

On a player’s turn, she plays any number of cards from her hand of five, and uses the Runes and Power to make any purchases or fights that she can. Any Constructs she plays stay in her play area, while played Heroes, purchased cards, and defeated monsters are placed into her discard pile, and new hand of 5 cards is drawn. Play continues until one player gets a set number of Honor gems, which causes the game to end and the person with the most Honor between their personal deck cards and tokens to win.

Gray’s experience with Magic: The Gathering clearly shines through in Ascension‘s gameplay. As opposed to Dominion or Thunderstone, Ascension has both a greater luck component and more of a sense of direct turn-by-turn competition with your opponents. Having a randomized central deck that you can only make limited purchases from, as opposed to having all the card choices available for purchase at any time, emphasizes short-term tactics based on what’s available as opposed to long-term strategy. Also, being able to see what Constructs your opponents have in play and what purchases they’ve made from the Central Deck gives you the opportunity to guess their strategy⁶ and counter it.

What works well: The game design is very accessible, quick to set up, and easy to play. The art style is unique and well-done. The dynamics of card purchasing and playing Constructs allows for a lot of direct player interaction, and rewards flexible, tactical thinking. The overall package is slick, and simply a lot of fun.

Not so much: The game board, while quite nice, is superfluous and unneeded. The relative lack of card depth makes the game less “fresh” with multiple plays. The theme could have been made more relevant to the finish of the game.

Endgame: Ascension is fun, swift, and has easy-to-grok mechanics. Compared with Dominion, it’s less about deep strategy and more focused on tactical luck-management with more player interaction, giving it a different flavor. With exceptionally straightforward rules and priced $5 less than either the basic sets of Dominon or Thunderstone, Ascension makes for a nigh-perfect “entry level” deck-building game. I forsee this getting a lot of use at my table, and I especially look forward to acquiring the recently released Return of the Fallen expansion to add more card variety.

Next column, I’ll quench my ranting about games not embracing their theme by looking at one that was designed from the theme-up…

[This review is based on personal play with a copy of the game I bought with my own cashy money. John Cmar has no financial or personal interests in Gary Games or anyone involved with the design or production of Ascension: Chronicle of the Godslayer.]

1. A group of card games, or so I contend. “Bunch” is boring. “Gaggle” doesn’t quite work. As most of these aren’t violent enough, “murder” doesn’t fit. [↩]
2. The Family Game Store in Savage, MD. Game store owners are an excellent breed as a rule, but Steve Sinex and family are among the best. If you are in the area, you owe it to yourself to check them out. [↩]
3. Did I mention that we loves us some minions here at The Secret Lair? Because, really, we do. [↩]
4. As opposed to Thunderstone, which has several numerical resources – XP, light, gold provided, strength, cost to purchase, et cetera – on the face of many card that aren’t as well differentiated from each other, making things confusing until you’ve played it enough to get used to the layout. [↩]
5. 8 of which are Apprentices worth 1 Rune each, and 2 are Militia cards worth 1 Power each. [↩]
6. There are many groups of cards, both inside of and among factions, that work very well together in terms of generating Power or acquiring new cards quickly, for instance. [↩]

If the gameplay of Dominion was expanded to involve stabbing things in the face, along with a dose of MATH,¹ you would have an excellent game – and that game would be Thunderstone.

Wait! Drek… that was putting the conclusion first. Let’s start this a bit more properly:

Last week, I started a tour through the realm of deck-building card games with Dominion, the first and arguably the most popular of this new genre. Subsequent deck-building games have tried to do very different things with the basic gameplay formula that game pioneered, with varying degrees of success. Today I’ll consider Thunderstone, which by keeping the core game mechanic the same while expanding on a specific theme, manages to mostly retain the balance and simplicity of Dominion while making something that is far more interesting to play.²

Vital statistics: Thunderstone is a non-collectible deck-building strategy card game designed by Mike Elliott and published by Alderac Entertainment Group in 2009. It handles 2-5 players, and claims to have a playing time of 45 minutes, although most sessions I’ve run have lasted longer than that. It is rated as suitable for ages 12 and up, which seems appropriate given both the mechanics and mental MATH³ involved.

Theme and production: Thunderstone has a dark medieval fantasy theme that involves abstracted combat, which may not be to the taste of some people,⁴ but still allows for family play with children who are old enough. Each player takes the role of an adventurer who has arrived at the village of Barrowsdale, seeking a powerful artifact called the Thunderstone. The Thunderstone is hidden deep in the nearby Grimhold Dungeon, and much to the complete shock of anyone who has played a game with a dark fantasy setting before, it is guarded by a horde of monsters. The goal of the game is to equip a party of heroes from the village, venture into the dungeon to defeat monsters, and eventually to uncover the Thunderstone, at which point the game ends.

Most of the cards represent people and items you can acquire from the village to aid in your fight for the Thunderstone. Unlike the kingdom cards in Dominion, which all functioned in the same way despite what was thematically depicted on them (i.e., a person or a location), in Thunderstone the thematic distinctions among the different village cards affect gameplay: Hero cards allow you to attack a monster, while you can only use a weapon card in combat if you also have a hero card in your hand that meets the requirements to wield it, for example. Although this does sacrifice a degree of simplicity, it makes the game feel like it was designed with the theme in mind as opposed to giving the sense that a coat of medieval paint was added on after the design was complete.

The cards are of good quality and thin enough to allow easy shuffling, which means that they are susceptible to wear with repeated plays. Artist Jason Engle did excellent work with the art, and the fact that a single artist worked on every card adds further consistency to the fantasy world the game takes place in. Card layout features artwork over two-thirds of each card, serving to pull you in to the experience even more. The only downside to the card design is that there isn’t enough font and color differentiation among the different numbers depicted on each card – representing purchase cost, strength score to wield items, XP cost to level up, et cetera – which can easily confuse newer players as to what each number represents until they’ve play through the game a few times. The box is large and comes with a slotted plastic tray to organize the cards, although the slotting system is a bit crude and is really only good at separating general large decks from each other as opposed to each specific card type.

Gameplay: The bulk of the central play area represents the village of Barrowsdale, and which is comprised of 16 stacks of cards. 4 of these are Basic cards that are present in every game⁵ that represent plentiful, cheap resources. The remaining stacks include 8 types of Village cards,⁶ and 4 types of Hero cards⁷ which are more expensive and powerful. The remainder of the play area portrays the dungeon, where 3 Monster classes⁸⁹ are shuffled together to form a monster deck. The Thunderstone is shuffled into the bottom 10 cards of the monster deck. The top 3 monsters are drawn and laid out in a line, representing their infestation of the dungeon.

Each player starts with a deck of 12 cards of identical composition¹⁰ shuffled as theire player deck, and draws 6 cards into their hand. Each player can do one of three things on their turn: 1. visit the village to level up hero cards in their hand to a more powerful version, and to use their cards in hand to purchase a new card from the villiage, 2. venture into the dungeon to fight a monster, or 3. rest, which allows the player to remove a card from their deck entirely and take no other action. At the end of the turn all cards a player used or still remaining in their hand are placed into their personal discard pile, as are any new cards purchased, and they draw a fresh hand of 6 cards from their personal deck. When the deck runs out, they shuffle their discard pile to form their new deck. This way, players add to their deck to allow them better and more powerful options when fighting monsters in combat.

The combat system revolves around the idea that there is a line of 3 monsters present at all times, and the card at the head of the line is in the “highest” part of the dungeon, while the one at the back of the line is in the “lowest”. All of the monsters have a darkness penalty based on where they are in the line that makes them harder to hit. A player can attack any of the 3 monsters currently revealed in the play area, but attacking one “lower” in the dungeon incurs a greater darkness penalty than attacking one “higher” in the dungeon. When monsters are killed and removed from the line, any monsters present move to a higher position in the dungeon and a new monster card is drawn in the lowest position. This makes it more difficult for players to preferentially target the easier to kill monsters, as freshly revealed monsters will be harder to hit. While not complex, juggling the negative modifiers for darkness and a monster’s special abilities with the positive modifiers from the cards in a player’s hand does require a bit of on the fly MATH¹¹ that can slow the game down a bit on occasion.

Any monsters a player kills are added to their personal deck, and provide victory points, gold for purchasing power at the village, and sometimes special abilities in combat. Additionally, killing a monster grants the player XP, which they can use to level up their hero cards in the village. The game ends when the Dungeon Deck is depleted to the point where the Thunderstone is revealed, and once it makes it to the “highest” point in the dungeon, the game is over. The player with the most victory points in their deck at that time WINS.

What works well: Gameplay takes the straightforward simplicity of Dominion and adds just enough mechanical robustness to make it into a different, more interesting strategy game. The mechanics fully embrace the game’s theme, which makes it very engaging to play. There is a huge amount of Hero and Village card types, ensuring lots of replayability. You stab things in the face.

Not so much: Doing on the fly MATH¹² during combat when multiple penalties and bonuses are involved can be cumbersome at times. Some of the Monster Card types¹³ don’t feel diverse enough when played through the course of a game.

Endgame: You already know my verdict – if the gameplay of Dominion was expanded to involve stabbing things in the face, along with a dose of MATH,¹⁴ you would have an excellent game – and that game would be Thunderstone. I find it to have a different and more interesting flavor than Dominion because of more detailed mechanics with different card types, the combat system, and it being more thematically fleshed out – the story behind the game feels very relevant to the gameplay, which is a good thing. But are there other deck-building games that can top it? We’ll audition a new contender next time.

[This review is based on personal play with a copy of the game I bought with my own cashy money. John Cmar has no financial or personal interests in Alderac Entertainment Group or anyone involved with the design or production of Thunderstone.]

1. *gasp* [↩]
2. At least for me, as I greatly enjoy stabbing things in the face. In games, that is. [↩]
3. *gasp* [↩]
4. Admittedly, my first reaction when I learned about the game was “Oh, yippie, another dungeon crawling RPG-lite card game…”, but any exasperation with the general unoriginality of the concept was squashed once I actually started playing. [↩]
5. This ensures that players will always have access to cards that will allow them to do useful things, especially in the beginning of the game – the militia is counts a hero card that can attack monsters, the torch provides a small amount of light which can aid in combat, the dagger gives a small bonus to attack, and iron rations give a bonus to a hero’s strength – and all cost a minimal amount of gold [↩]
6. randomized from 19 different types included in the game [↩]
7. randomized from 9 types [↩]
8. randomized from 8 classes [↩]
9. I use the term “class” here instead of “type” as monster cards are slightly different; a stack of Village cards of the same type contains 8 identical cards, whereas a stack of Monster cards contains 8 cards comprised of doubles of 4 different monsters that are related in terms of look or abilities, like “Undead – Spirit” or “Enchanted”. In some classes, the individual monsters are diverse, but in several of the classes they are a bit same-y which makes them less fun to fight over and over. [↩]
10. 6 militia for fighting, and 2 torches, 2 daggers, and 2 iron rations for support. [↩]
11. *gasp* [↩]
12. *gasp* [↩]
13. I’m looking at you, Doomknights. [↩]
14. *gasp* [↩]

Of late, I’ve found myself enamored of the relatively new genre of non-collectible deck building card games. These tend to operate in a similar vein as collectible card games like Magic: The Gathering, with two notable exceptions: 1. they aren’t hellish money-sinks, as everything you need to play competitively is in the game box you buy, as opposed to CCG’s where competitive players need to drop wads of cash to buy numerous booster packs in a quest to find rare and powerful cards, and 2. a core piece of gameplay is actually building your deck from a common pool of cards during the course of the game, whereas with CCG’s you start play with a deck you’ve customized from your personal card collection. Having had the opportunity to play several deck building games of late, and noting that even being non-collectible, they represent not an insignificant investment of money, I’ll be using my little corner of The Lair to comparatively look at a few of them more closely in the coming weeks.

If you aren’t familiar with how deck building games work, the basic concept is thus: each player starts with a small, identical deck of cards, and can only draw a few of these into their hand on each turn. There is a central pool of cards available to everyone, and players attempt to acquire cards from this pool to add into their deck. Each card has different special abilities and advantages when played, depending on the theme of the game – currency to buy other cards from the pool, a combat value to defeat enemy cards, the ability to draw more cards into your hand from your deck on a given turn, et cetera – and the core strategy is to build the most efficient, powerful deck of cards that work well together in order to satisfy the victory conditions¹ and WIN. On the scale of luck versus skill, this genre is all about strategizing in your choice of what cards to put into your deck in order to manage the luck of what you randomly draw into your hand and can use each turn.

The best known and most decorated game of this genre is, unquestionably, Dominion, and so that is what I will consider today. Also, because the word Dominion contains the word “minion”, and at The Secret Lair, we loves us some minions².

Vital statistics: Dominion is a non-collectible deck-building strategy card game designed by Donald X. Vaccarino and published by Rio Grande Games in 2008. It handles 2-4 players, and claims to have a playing time of 30 minutes, although most sessions I’ve played tend to run a little longer. It is rated as suitable for ages 8 and up, which seems appropriate for understanding the game mechanics.

Theme and production: Dominion has an inoffensive medieval fantasy theme that focuses on evoking the flavor of a Renaissance Festival, and not on stabbing people in the face³, making it quite suitable for family play. Each player takes the role of a monarch who is in control of a small kingdom, with the ultimate goal of building your dominion to a larger extent than the other players. To this end, the cards that give you victory points are Estates, Duchies, and Provinces, representing the territory you are collecting.

The majority of cards in the game are kingdom cards, that are designed with typical medieval fantasy tropes, including people (such as a Chancellor or Witch), structures (the Moat or Throne Room are examples), or events (like a Feast or Festival). This gives sufficient flavor to the proceedings, although it’s important to note that most of the kingdom cards are similar in how they function in the game despite having seemingly disparate things represented on them; for example, the Adventurer and the Cellar kingdom cards are both Action cards that function in the same way, despite being an exciting person and a musty place, respectively. While this makes sense in the context of the rules, it is a slight disappointment from a thematic perspective.

The cards themselves are of reasonable quality and thin enough to be easily shuffled, but not excessively wear-resistant with numerous plays. The art ranges from merely okay to great, but is given less than half of the space on each card in order to make room for game information, which makes the illustrations seem less important – letting the art have more visual real estate would draw me in a bit more to the medieval-ness of the game. The box is surprisingly large, equaling that of many board games, but includes a plastic tray with numerous slots to keep the card types sorted for easy storage and play.

Gameplay: The game comes with 25 different types of kingdom cards, of which 10 types are chosen to be used in a given game, and form 10 individual stacks in the central play area. Most of the kingdom cards are Action cards and each kingdom card type has different abilities, which can include allowing the player to draw or play more cards during their turn, giving a currency bonus to buy new cards, upgrading or eliminating less powerful cards from the player’s hand, or other more specific effects. As the kingdom cards are not mixed together, during any given turn a player has the opportunity to acquire any of the 10 types available if they have the resources to do so. Additionally, a large number of currency cards (Copper, Silver, and Gold) and a more limited number of victory cards (the aforementioned Estates, Duchies, and Provinces) are available for all players to purchase from the central play area.

Each player starts with a deck of 10 cards of identical composition⁴, and draws 5 cards into their hand. Play proceeds with each player playing one action card from their hand and buying a card from the play area with currency from their hand per turn, and then discarding the remainder of their hand and all cards used during the turn into their personal discard pile. Any new cards acquired are also discarded. At the end of the turn, a player will draw 5 new cards, and when their deck runs out, they shuffle their personal discard pile to refill it. In this way, each player is continuously adding to their deck to allow them to do more and different things on subsequent turns.

Given that the majority of the kingdom cards affect only the person playing them, there is relatively little direct interaction between the players as the game progresses⁵. This means that most of interplay between players is in observing the strategies of others, tracking their success, and modifying your own strategy to compensate. The game ends when all of the Provinces⁶ have been purchased, or 3 of the 10 types of kingdom cards have been depleted from the central play area. The player with the most victory cards in their deck WINS. This brings up an important element of the game – victory cards have no other function beyond taking up space in your deck. This means that if you acquire too many victory cards too soon, the chances of them being drawn into your hand on each turn are higher… which means you have less of a chance of cards that will allow you to do things on your turn.

What works well: Gameplay is fast and enjoyable, with a strategic component that is deep and varied without being overly complex. Later in the game, being able to construct chains of actions during a single turn as a result of the interplay of the abilities of multiple cards is exceedingly fun. The numerous combinations possible from the 25 types of kingdom cards ensures a massive amount of replayability.

Not so much: Gameplay mechanics don’t fully embrace the fantasy medieval theme, which in turn doesn’t provide any face-stabbing. The art could have been been featured with slightly more prominence on the cards, which would have enhanced their attractiveness without impacting the clarity of the game information being presented.

Endgame: Dominion is simply a great game, especially if you are looking for something that’s straightforward to play while being strategically deep at the same time. It’s not excessively luck driven and has very little “screw the other player” dynamics, both of which are strong points for me. While I haven’t played with any of them, there are several boxed expansions out that provide new kingdom cards and rules to further enhance what is already a greatly replayable game⁷. The only thing that keeps me from coming back to Dominion more frequently than I already do is that the medieval theme is a bit boring in it’s implementation. Fortunately, there are other deck-building games that allow for a bit more excitement through face-stabbing, as well see next time.

[This review is based on personal play with a copy of the game I bought with my own cashy money. John Cmar has no financial or personal interests in Rio Grande Games or anyone involved with the design or production of Dominion.]

1. Usually, getting the most victory points. [↩]
2. Some more than others. On second thought, the less we speak of that, the better. [↩]
3. Neither in the real-life sense, nor in the “screw your neighbor” gameplay sense, nor in the thematic combat sense. Much to my disappointment, at least with the latter. [↩]
4. 7 Coppers for buying power, and 3 Estates for a meager starting supply of victory points [↩]
5. A few kingdom cards, such as the Militia, do allow a player to affect the cards of other players – in this case, forcing another player to discard 2 cards from their hand. [↩]
6. The most expensive, and most valuable, victory point card. [↩]
7. I’ll ignore the fact that having multiple expansions to a non-collectible game is testing somewhat the concept of it being “non-collectible”. Yes, I know the “collectible” designation in CCG’s is about buying many packs of cards to collect rare and ultra-rare cards, but still. [↩]

…the Need For Speed.

It’s been more than twenty years since I first played a racing game on a personal computer. That game was Test Drive, and I played it¹ on an Apple //GS. The Duel: Test Drive II, followed and many, many more hours of my late teens were spent behind the virtual steering wheel of various supercars, fleeing from Johnny Law. I was a high-octane rebel, racing at breakneck speeds and violating more motor vehicle laws than the entire Duke clan combined.

Shortly after I purchased my first PC, Test Drive 4 was released, but it was pretty much unplayable, and I didn’t buy another racing game until I joined the ranks of console gamers and picked up Burnout 2: Point of Impact for the Xbox. I’ve played every Criterion-developed installment² in the Burnout series since: Burnout 3: Takedown, Burnout Revenge, and Burnout Paradise.³

I’ve also dabbled with the Project Gotham Racing, Midnight Race and Midtown Madness series on the Xbox, but no racing games have consumed my time as much as the Burnout titles. As of this writing, Burnout Paradise on the PC has stolen fifty-four hours that could have been spent for the betterment of humanity.⁴

As much time as I’ve spent driving like a nitro-powered maniac through the streets of Paradise City, racing faster and faster cars from the marina to the ballpark, trying to beat the clock as I barreled toward the wind farm, and taking down dozens of cars, trucks and SUVs in aggressive Road Rage events, I’ve always felt that Burnout Paradise (and the entire Burnout series in general) is missing something; a mode of play I haven’t seen since I played that first Test Drive game way back in the late 1980s.

Enter Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit. Developed by Criterion, the same folks who have been serving me heaping helpings of crash-and-Burnout goodness for the past half-dozen or so years, NFS: HP (as the kids are calling it…or not) brings back the chase mode that I loved in Test Drive and The Duel,⁵ putting the player behind the wheel of a souped-up police interceptor or looking at that same interceptor in the rearview mirror.

I’ve only played NFS: HP for a couple of hours, but I did notice one fairly significant difference between it and Test Drive: my dashboard isn’t magenta.⁶ I’ve also unlocked at least a half-dozen cars since I began playing: Vettes and Beemers, Porches and Nissans and, yes, that yellow Camaro. Compare that to the original Test Drive, which featured a grand total of five cars. And while I seem to recall deploying a spike strip or two, I’m fairly certain that I wasn’t executing the PIT maneuver on my Apple //GS . Change is good.

What are your favorite racing games? Do you prefer an arcade style of play that allows for ridiculous, unbelievable driving, or a game that provides realistic physics and allows you to tweak your car (weight distribution, tire pressure, etc.) to shave fractions of seconds off your lap times?

1. …and played it, and played it. [↩]
2. Burnout Legends and Burnout Dominator were not developed by Criterion, and neither were available on the Xbox. [↩]
3. I own and play both the PC and Xbox 360 versions of Burnout Paradise. [↩]
4. I’ve only recently begun exploring the online multiplayer gameplay in Burnout Paradise with Minister Lynn and Commandant Moore. [↩]
5. Yes, I’m sure other games released in the intervening years have featured pursuit modes, but I haven’t played any of them. [↩]
6. In fact, Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit does not feature a camera view in which the dashboard is visible, but as I prefer an external chase camera, I don’t mind. [↩]

Like many of us, I have a tally of geek sins on my soul. These are, typically, sins of omission: a seminal movie unwatched, a classic game never played, a canonical tome not read. Some of them are out of blatant disinterest or avoidance,¹ but I do admit that many require penance on my part.² I have just redeemed myself of one of these sins, however… I have finally played The Orange Box.

Despite being a first-person shooter junkie from the moment I started tinkering with PC hardware,³ I just never got around to playing Half-Life 2. The game came out in 2004 during my medical residency, when I had no PC capable of running it, and by the time I rectified that, there were newer and shinier things crying out for my attention.⁴ Subsequently, the Half-Life 2 sequels Episode 1 and Episode 2 emerged, along with this other little game called Portal, but the obsessive-compulsive side of me⁵ refused to touch them until playing the first game, and so I remained roundly mocked by my gamer friends and blissfully unaware of what I was missing out on.

Then, a few weeks back, I heard tell of Portal 2 coming out. My wife Laura then presented the following Chain of Logical Reasoning: 1. Portal, we hear, is quite the fun game. 2. We should find it and play it, especially since the sequel is almost here, and man would that ever net us some geek cred, baby!⁶ 3. I bet, somewhere between the PS3 and our Macs, we have the technology to run it.⁷ And so, we found ourselves picking up The Orange Box for the PS3 in order to snag Portal, and as such I found myself in possession of Half-Life 2 as well.

At this point, here’s what I remembered about these games. Half-Life 2 – a stupid number of game of the year/decade/all time awards, great shooter gameplay, a badass gravity gun and physics system, and cool scripted sequences. Portal – interesting physics-based puzzles, something about cake and lies, and Jonathan Coulton wrote the end credits song that’s pretty damn catchy. Then, I finally played the games 7 and 4 years late respectively, and absolved my geek sin in this regard.

Here is what I learned:⁸

• Portal really is all that and a bag of chips. For some reason, I had been led to believe that Portal was mainly about using the first person shooter perspective to create interesting and challenging physics puzzles, with a bit of a story slapped on top of it. Much to my delight, the story is at turns engaging and hilarious, is extensively fleshed out for an experience that has ony about two hours of gameplay, and is integrated fully into the Half-Life universe. One of my favorite in-game moments was coming across an office where a Powerpoint presentation is playing, detailing Aperture Science’s⁹ strategy for competing with Black Mesa¹⁰ for United States Department of Defense contracts. I must say that the character of GLaDOS as the controlling intelligence of the Aperture Science facility is brilliantly conceived and executed. And Still Alive by Jonathan Coulton now makes quite a bit more sense…
• That noted, what really wins the day is the game design. Portal strikes a nigh-perfect balance of leading the player to intuitively figure things out on a level by level basis, allowing previously learned skills to build on each other as the game progresses, and giving just enough freedom to fail spectacularly to make the ultimate completion of each puzzle that much more satisfying. On that subject, if you’ve never played Portal with the developer’s commentary on, I highly recommend it. Not only are Ellen McLain’s anecdotes about voicing GLaDOS delightful, but the programmers’ notes on how they had to modify the game’s physics engine to make the portal mechanics work are intriguing, and the developers’ insights into how aspects of certain levels were changed based on the behavior of game playtesters gives some fascinating insight into game theory.
• Half-Life 2 also happens to be all that and a bag of chips. The core shooter gameplay is damn fun, and the roster of weapons is satisfying.¹¹ The level design is focused on an excellent mix of scripted sequences that never leave you feeling like you are wandering from area to area, killing random enemies. Instead, you have a sense of urgency moving you along – such as being hunted by superior forces across broken city rooftops, or racing against time to complete an objective – which results in you being propelled through the game organically, with opponents appearing in natural ways as the action calls for it. There are also a healthy number of puzzles to break things up, all of which are intuitive and make sense in the context of the situations they arise in.
• There are key elements in gameplay between Portal and Half-Life 2 that elevate them as superior gaming experiences. Especially after playing Portal first and hearing the developers’ insights, it’s obvious how attentive the game designers were in terms of balancing challenges and rewards in level construction, especially with feedback from playtesters.¹² Beyond any other first-person shooters I’ve played in recent memory, these two succeed because they’ve been tweaked to hit all the right notes – the combat is a blast, the puzzles are inventive and not difficult to the point of frustration, the atmosphere from the art and sound direction is engrossing, and the writing and voice acting are top notch.

My sin is expunged! My soul feels lighter already. Now, if only Half-Life 2: Episode 3 would see the light of day sometime soon… Meanwhile, there’s this little plastic box labeled Portal 2 that’s sitting next to the television as I type this. Perhaps I need to take that for a spin, lest my soul fall further into perdition.

1. I don’t care how much a part of geek (or, arguably, mainstream) culture World of Warcraft has become, I haven’t played it and never will. Mainly because if I start it, I may find myself playing at the expense of important things, like employment and food consumption. [↩]
2. Two easy examples that some find particularly egregious: I have never watched any version of Blade Runner. I have never read A Game of Thrones. [↩]
3. I cracked the case on my first PC, a 386, to install a video card so I could better run Wolfenstein 3D. [↩]
4. Doom 3 for one, which is a gorgeous and visceral game, but no Half-Life 2. In hindsight, my priorities were way off. [↩]
5. All doctors, no matter what personality type, are required to have a bit of OCD in their makeup or else they won’t survive the training process. [↩]
6. It’s possible she didn’t actually say that last bit. [↩]
7. We do have an Xbox 360, but my extensive history with PC’s means that when at all possible, I must slather hate and scorn upon Microsoft at every turn, up to and including supporting their platform as little as possible. [↩]
8. You, very likely, already know these things. Just give me a chance to catch up here… [↩]
9. The company that owns the facility depicted in Portal, if you somehow didn’t know that. [↩]
10. The research facility in Half-Life – again, if you somehow didn’t know that. [↩]
11. Gravity gun! YES. [↩]
12. One truism mentioned was that in the midst of an action sequence or time pressure, it’s surprisingly difficult to get gamers to look up at the ceiling/sky in the game world, so specific design decisions were made to make people do just that. [↩]

Dropping 7. Or 2. We can drop 2.

This was originally to be a review of you’d-better-own-it-by-now-if-you-have-an-iPhone Drop 7, but quickly slid into the ranting of a discontented grognard when I discovered the news of that game property’s sale to a different company, and it’s subsequent tweaking. Hold on, let me get my beating cane¹… there we go. Let’s do this.

Time was, if you wanted buy a program for your home computer, be it a game or a word processor, you could go to the store and buy it in a box. This was very similar to how one would go out to buy, say, a hardback novel or an eggplant, and came with a similar consumer-minded set of expectations: the thing that you bought was tangibly yours to do with as you please, it was a final product that was professionally finished and complete, and it did exactly what you would expect it to². We have not entirely left this time behind us yet, but new methods for sale and delivery of software, as well as new devices on which to use it, have forced us to shelve this older consumer perspective is favor of wrestling with what ownership, copyright, and even “a finished program” mean in the digital age.

As an old geezer from the heady days of the early retail computer era, I lamented the original changes I saw with the rise of the Internet as a way to aid software distribution. The first steps were baby ones, taken with the screetch and stutter of modemry. These involved shareware/demos/smaller utilities, because there was NO WAY that people would be crazy enough to either distribute or receive full programs online((Well, someone who didn’t have a few days, a hundred floppy disks, and access to a BBS or five of that dealt in something called warez. Which was never me. Nope.)). What stoked my ire was the trend of developers realizing that this new thing gave them an “out” when it came to a finished project – no longer did the thing that was in the box need to work perfectly, or even be the final thing, as you could just provide a patch over the Internet for any problems once the software was released. Of course, business decisions being what they are, this led to cases of software being shipped in an essentially unusable state in order to meet an arbitrary sales deadline, with the assumption on someone’s part that this was okay to do because it could be fixed later.

Fortunately, as we have boldly stepped into the future, good business sense has often prevailed, and instances of such profit-focused shortcutting remain the rare exception. Also, the ever-increasing prevalence of high-bandwidth SKYNET Internet access and the always-improving tech specs of comp-u-tronic devices have led to digital distribution methods for entire, large programs³. That noted, interest of late has surged in creating more streamlined software optimized for digital distribution. The rise of the smartphone as a popular and viable platform has brought this idea to the fore, in the concept of the app. Central to the app idea is not just that it’s a program, but it’s a program that can be updated periodically to add new features, or overcome issues with a new iteration of the smartphone flavor of the week. The end result is a program that, depending on what it is intended to do, may never have a final version.

This makes sense for many apps, but for certain programs and games, once the developer gets it right, there’s never a need to issue another update⁴. But when one is wedded to an auto-update service like iTunes/the Apple App Store for us iPhone users, the potential exists for a developer to not leave well enough alone, and decide to change a program that’s worked just fine for years for inscrutable reasons, yielding a net negative for the consumer.

Let us consider the case of the game Drop 7. *smacks beating cane into palm*

Drop 7 is my first recommendation whenever someone asks what to snag as a game for the iPhone. Owning a bit of inspiration from both Tetris and Bejeweled, Drop 7 is a puzzle game that involves dropping balls onto a 7 by 7 gameboard, using tactical number matching to clear the screen and score points. It strikes the sweet spot for a phone game – short, easy to return to if interrupted, and with just the right mix of luck and challenge – so much so that it’s my reflex to load it anywhere from a prolonged elevator ride to when a commercial comes on live television. Since coming to market in early 2009, it’s been critically well-reviewed and has made numerous Top-Whatever lists for iPhone games. Apart from tweaks for issues with new iPhone OS releases, it hasn’t seen any frequent updates, because it hasn’t needed any. I paid the few measly dollars, I played a ridiculous amount, and all was well.

At least, until a few weeks ago, when Area/Code Entertainment sold Drop 7 to developer Zynga, who then released an auto-update for the game, as well as a completely new version. And as the Internet is want to do, bad reviews commenced.

Zynga decided they needed to release a new version with “enhanced retinal display graphics”⁵, in both a free ad-supported version and a pay ad-replete version. By many counts, the graphics are apparently optimized for the retinas of hagfish, and furthermore, many users are experiencing bugs that make the game unplayable. Fortunately, as an owner of the original version, I am not being forced to download either of the new ones. Unfortunately, Zynga wants to push me towards downloading the new stuff, so released an update for my version that includes an obnoxious screen with the start of every game that asks if I want to download the new retinal-rrific experience. It only stands to reason that in the future, they may phase out the old app entirely.

While it seems a relatively minor quibble, keep in mind that I’m holding a beating cane. Also, it brings up an interesting side effect of auto-update services like iTunes, in that you may be repeatedly prompted to download a new version that you know is inferior to the current one. Yes, you can choose not to update that particular app, but anyone who has used iTunes knows that the momentum of the service is to update everything, and to retain an older version of any app is inconvenient at best.

Despite my grumblings, I look forward to the further expansion of digital software delivery, and the eventual death of going to a brick and mortar⁶ to buy a computer program. One of the biggest challenges will be for the consumer mindset to move away from the expectation of buying a box that contains the final, finished program. Digital delivery offers the promise of being able to deliver valuable new content and updates, as well as bug fixes, immediately⁷. One of the largest threats to consumers accepting this is the potential for developers to want to make changes to a stellar chunk of code for the sake of change itself, and being locked in to services like iTunes which don’t give consumers the easy autonomy to avoid unwanted updates. Here’s hoping that other parties in our lovely free market environment can develop delivery systems that allow for more robust user content and update control so that it’s just as easy to stay with a software version that works as it is to upgrade to a newer one.

At Zynga, I point my beating cane disapprovingly. But not for too long, because I can start a new game in the time this takes to upload.

Drop 7 gameplay video

1. I really do need a beating cane. Ideally, it would be a stout and true shillelagh, because I’m 1/8th Irish. Also, if I were able to obtain any superpower, it would be to project bolts of energy through said shillelagh ala Black Tom Cassidy, because, really, who wouldn’t do that if they could. Not I. [↩]
2. This is a separate issue from said software not working because the purchaser was an idiot didn’t ensure that it was compatible with their computer. From my ancient customer service and tech support experience at CompUSA, I can assure you that 99% of the software returns for “it not working” were due to user error, either in terms of trying to use a program on a system it wasn’t rated for, or something the user had done to the hardware or during the install that borked things up; it was a relatively rare thing for it to be totally the software’s fault. [↩]
3. Valve Software’s Steam service is a prime example from the gaming realm. [↩]
4. Barring the predictable future issues with a phone OS upgrade, of course [↩]
5. Really, the person who wrote that ad copy must have worked on Star Trek as one of the people who inserted tech jargon into scripts. [↩]
6. RIP CompUSA, specifically the Dayton, OH, store, d. 2007 [↩]
7. I would not at all be surprised if franchise programs, like office suites or sports games that put out a new version every year or few, eventually move to a subscription model to the end user, instead of requiring the purchase of a new program on a regular basis. [↩]

I’ll admit it, I loves me some video games. I was one of those kids who, around age 11, was plastered to our Curtis Mathes cabinet television,¹ playing Atari Pac-Man on our Sears game system so many times that I adjusted the contrast and brightness, making the ghosts invisible just to make the game harder. I still have the carts for it, as well as many more collected from my days working at Goodwill², and I still have my Sega Genesis (with CD), SNES and Commodore 64c in my basement– though I haven’t cracked them open in a long time, thanks to emulators.³

I was never, though, much of a first-adopter. The SNES and Sega I bought at second-hand shops, and the fact that I have a Commodore 64c⁴ tells you something as well. I’m the same way with games. I have a hard time letting myself spend more than twenty dollars on a video game. There’s nothing out there that makes me scream, “I MUST HAVE THIS NOW!” If I end up in a department store, I usually eye past the discount and clearance shelves in the electronics department to see what’s been cast aside for bigger and better things. Found myself a combo pack of Ovlivion & Bioshock for $20 that way.⁵  Better, in my opinion, than the $100 I would have spent on the two when they first came out. They’re still fun to play you know, even when they’re a year or two old.

As a matter of fact, I just finished, about six months ago, Half Life 2, which I got as a Steam gift almost a year previously. I enjoyed the heck out of it, and since I’m a late-goer, had plenty of resources on hand for the few sticky spots⁶ I ran into. I’m currently in the process of replaying it, and right now I’m in the middle of earning the ‘grav gun only’ achievement in Ravenholm, which I’m learning is a pain in the ass, but reunites me with my favourite weapon in the game – and maybe of all time – grav gun + circular saw blade. I had one single blade for so long, I thought about naming it.

Which brings me to a question: What’s the quality mark of replayability in a game? Barring short-term, arcade-style twitch games that demand multiple plays, of course. I have no idea, but I know what I like. Sometimes it’s just availability, or lack thereof of other games. Sometimes it’s just the thrill of the aspect, like in Descent and its ilk, which I’d played through many times⁷. Others… I dunno. For some reason, I’ve played Super Metroid for the SNES a good 10 times. Other games I’ve played and never thought twice about after. Chrono Trigger is the only RPG-style game I’ve ever repeated.

What games have you played the heck out of? What’s worth repeating? And, out of curiosity, what retro consoles do you have that are still in working order?

1. with fancy push-button channel-changing technology! [↩]
2. though I don’t have a working system– anyone have a spare they’re not using? [↩]
3. the 13-year-old in the house is eyeing them closely, though, looking for some retro gaming experience [↩]
4. stay a while… stay FOREVER! [↩]
5. not that I’ve had the time to play much of either, as yet [↩]
6. mainly the second swarm of Combines, where it’s you and three auto guns. Spent two hours on that one. [↩]
7. and will again, once I get the revamped version up and running [↩]

Build Your Kingdom: Be Legendary! And Buy Our Stuff!

Dragon Age: Legends is one part solid turn-based tactical combat game, one part blatant marketing whoredom¹ for Dragon Age 2 and other Electronic Arts games, and one part a sterling example of why Facebook is an ulcerative chancre on the loins of the Interwebs.

Legends is a free-to-play game on Facebook that is currently in open beta. The hook, especially for those like myself who eschew spending too much of our precious recreational time on that damnable Social Network, is that by completing quests in Legends, one can unlock special items in DA2 if they own it. The story of Legends has nothing to do with DA2‘s, however – you are an adventurer called upon by an old contact to help him track down his missing son. Predictably, this isn’t as straightforward as what it seems, and involves all manner of villainy specific to the rich world of Dragon Age, from hordes of darkspawn to horrifying abominations.

The gameplay is relatively simple, but has a solid foundation of strategic depth. Much like all fantasy-combat-games-with-roleplaying-elements since the dawn of Gygax, you create a character from one of several classes – in this case, a warrior, mage, or rogue – that you will eventualy customize further as you gain experience. The meat of the game is tactical combat. In each combat encounter, you assemble your party from a list of available Facebook friends’ characters and NPC’s, then fight through waves of enemies for rewards of gold and items. The combat is reasonably satisfying as you get deeper into the game, as the key to success in each encounter increasingly hinges on the balance of abilities you construct your party with, and the choices you make about when to use them.

The game’s website describes Legends as a RPG adventure game, which is a bit of a stretch in the role-playing department, given that you never actually get to play any sort of role beyond a killing machine²³. Apart from the aforementioned tactical combat, the other elements of gameplay are character customization and resource generation via maintaining a castle. The effects of enhancing ability scores or choosing different combat talents are significant, and what you choose can notably change how your character is best used when fighting. Castle design and upkeep is almost a separate game unto itself. It involves spending your hard-earned gold on different specialized rooms and workers to generate more resources to aid in combat later, such as healing potions or shard bombs. As much as I find it unpalatable that a core component of a Dragon Age game is building and decorating one’s house, this element of the game cannot be ignored – without a well balanced castle, you will run out of critical resources quickly.

Despite being a solid game, Legends simultaneously serves the marketing purpose of being an interactive commercial for DA2, among other games. Legends encourages you to sign up for a free EA online account, which allows you to connect your progress in this game to other EA games you own. Already noted is that playing Legends lets you unlock special items in DA2, but owning DA2 (or other recent EA releases, such as Dead Space 2 or Mass Effect 2) can also unlock items in Legends, leading to a vicious cycle of positive consumer reinforcement. While none of the items are overpowered or critical to victory in any of the games involved, the designers are keenly playing off the desire of most gamers to acquire More Shiny Things when there are More Shiny Things to be had, even when that means More Money to be Spent.

All that noted, the greatest criticism I can level at Legends is of its marketing and gameplay elements tied into it being a Facebook game⁴. For example, there is an arbitrary resource called Energy that you use to move around the map, and once you’ve depleted your Energy, the only way for it to be replenished is slowly over a period of four minutes per energy point. Additionally, once you use the character of a Facebook friend or an NPC as a member of your party in a combat encounter, you can’t use them again until a period of hours has passed. These two mechanisms encourage short bursts of play over repeated sessions as opposed to a long streak of play, which might seem appealing… except that the whole point of this is positive reinforcement to keep you coming back to the Facebook experience, increasing your exposure to advertising and the indirect chances you’ll spend money. Furthermore, there is a mobile web version of the game that has been developed (and apps for the various smartphone platforms are in the works) to entice you to check in on the resource development of your castle while you are away from a computer with a full web browser. Interestingly, the mobile version of the game only allows you to manage your castle, which is considered to be the interactive portion of the game with your Facebook friends.

Speaking of spending money, no major Facebook game would be complete without having a way to entice you to spend real world cash, and Legends is no exception. While the main currency in the game is gold that you earn as you go along, it turns out that you can only spend it on castle maintenance and certain resources. In order to purchase new weapons and armor (as oppose to those you find during the course of your adventures), more powerful items, the ability to bring back recently used characters into the party sooner, and other perks, you need to spend Crowns. You start the game with a limited number of Crowns, and the only way to acquire more is to buy them with real world money⁵. While the designers of indie Facebook games rely on the cashy money people spend on the premium resources therein to continue to develop those games, I suspect that’s far less the case for a corporate juggernaut like Electronic Arts. As with many things in life and on Facebook, Legends is billed as free to play, but requires money if you want an easy advantage.

The website for Legends states that it is “the first real game for Facebook”, which may very well be true. Sadly, this means that it comes with the slimy tendrils of Facebook’s advertising and marketing focused social media strategy intercalated within it, groping for your time, money, and very soul. Legends is a fun, solid game, but in a world where my most precious commodity is time, I’ll be spending more of it on deeper creative experiences… like, uh, Dragon Age 2. But first, I need to unlock Air of Confidence, the Ivo Family Crest, and Dura’s Blue Flame…

Dragon Age: Legends launch trailer

1. Without the syphilis, insofar as I’ve been able to discern. [↩]
2. This isn’t, per se, a bad role to play. It requires limited acting skills, and isn’t creatively taxing. There’s something primally satisfying about knowing that the scope of your thespian endeavors is to take the pointy thing and stick it in the eye of the grunting, slimy actor opposite of you. [↩]
3. Yes, I am well aware that in the digital realm, any game that uses experience points as a success metric and lets you improve your character as a result is smacked with the label of a RPG. Which makes less sense than the role-playing described above. [↩]
4. The only thing that would make it more morally ambiguous would be if it was developed by a pharmaceutical company, and all of the characters were named after antibiotics. [↩]
5. In what will come as a staggering surprise to you, you can also buy gold outright as well. [↩]